When attempting to capture an XP image using MDT2012U1 from a VMWare Workstation machine, I ran into an issue because WinPE could not see the Hard Drive when attempting the .WIM capture. After some searching, I found that adding the following setting to my Virtual Machine’s .VMX configuration file fixed the issue.

virtualDev setting for VMWare Workstation machines

Default

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.encoding="windows-1252"

config.version="8"

virtualHW.version="9"

scsi0.present="TRUE"

scsi0.virtualDev="lsisas1068"

memsize="4096"

scsi0:0.present="TRUE"

scsi0:0.fileName="BuildAndCapture-001-000003.vmdk"

Another useful setting is to force the VMWare machine to emulate an Intel E1000 adapter.